The punishment they seek

2013 September 20

by Tom Driscoll

I’ve long argued that the true challenge in contesting capital punishment doesn’t present itself with the plight of that occasional somehow sympathetic death row inmate. It’s not to be found in some bloodless cost benefit analysis of the practice as a public policy option either. This question resides on another level. It might be a question about law and government and policy, but it’s also a deeply personal one each and every one of us has to answer the hard way, honestly. How do we answer the question when we can stare it squarely in the very human face of one we’ve come to unabashedly despise?
These days we find ourselves presented with just such a face. The senseless murder of three innocent spectators at the Boston Marathon finish line with bombs that maimed and scarred so many more: within days we had the faces of the criminals and then their names. One of them would die in the manhunt that followed upon the atrocity, the other one we captured. But even before that capture it seemed we were set upon a special standing for this particular crime. These murders and maimings were “acts of terrorism,” authorities told us, and the pressure cooker home made bombs were “weapons of mass destruction.” This conception of the crime, as federal crime, so quickly offered, made way for one very specific possibility. Where the crime was committed here in a state with no provision for capital punishment, taking these crimes as federal crimes allows us to consider killing the man in our custody who committed them.

And who could fault us if we did?

Who can look at the faces of those innocents who died at the bombing scene, the young policeman gunned down days later, the many left so damaged they may never wholly heal —who could look there and not feel rage? —not demand justice? —and, yes, retribution? But this begs another question in turn. Should we feel any differently when the crime is one of lesser notice, on a smaller scale? Do we feel less for the victims of obscure more ordinary crime? What aspect of this atrocity justifies our killing the culprit where we would spare others?

The sharp and quick answer of course is the terrorism. There is a political or ideological color to this crime —we’re told this by the surviving killer himself, that the bombs were our punishment for the wars we wage in distant Islamic countries— and with this what reservations we have about capital punishment are put aside. This is not a incident of criminality in a civil society, so the argument goes, this is an act of war. Certain politicians announce that even allowing the war criminal Miranda rights is a dangerously mistaken notion. This is an enemy combatant.

What’s striking in all this is how the killer and those who would consider killing him happen to agree —that this particular crime was murder of a special stature. These deaths and dismemberments meant something more because of the ideology that motivated the perpetrators. We might rightly call the Marathon bombings senseless, but it is the sensibility behind them that we would consider punishing with death. One has to notice that in so doing we elevate the craven criminality to the level of warfare, the criminal to the status —as he might frame it in his own mind—of a soldier and a martyr.

This paradox where it comes to terrorism isn’t exactly news. The core strategic objective of many a terror campaign over the years —throughout history— has been the severity of retribution elicited. Punishment for punishment is meted out and the fringe cause comes somewhere closer step by step to level footing with the power it challenges.

But with the Boston Marathon bombings we have something slightly but very importantly different. From what we’ve learned thus far it would appear this violence wasn’t a part of some coordinated terror campaign. There was no mastermind calling the shots from some darkened cave. The “religious motivations” that drove the bombers were vaguely ideological. These weren’t holy soldiers so much as they were sentimentalists, alienated young men hungry for a sense of meaning and consequence to their actions, to their existence. Anything to escape anonymity and a sense of purposelessness —anything to attain celebrity. Islam might might have seemed to offer a cosmic sort of celebrity, but one has to wonder if this was merely a choice of brand, not much different from the notoriety of spectacle slaughter to an Aurora, Colorado multiplex shooting spree —or the carnage of a Connecticut schoolroom.

The dead don’t know the difference.

This is where the question of the punishment folds back upon itself for me. I am one of those who generally and statistically argues against the death penalty. As I consider them now I know these murders are not statistical cases. And I realize none of them ever are for those touched directly by crime. Just now I don’t think I can frame this as a political argument with obvious sides. I’ve been more certain about this issue in the past. Words like mercy and compassion and redemption, what do they mean to us weighed against a word like justice? Who holds that scale to weigh them? I suppose we each of us have to. This is where it becomes personal.

I don’t regret that we’ve made it difficult to execute even our most despicable citizens in this country. Yet there is the bind. It is with this that I worry what signal of meaning we give in those rare instances when we choose to do just that. As we render each state killing so carefully, deliberately —ritualistically even—we might unwittingly dignify the reckless crimes of desperately warped children. With our extraordinary punishment we might offer the notice and sense of importance they crave. We might punish with the very reward they seek. Wouldn’t that serve to invite the next atrocity?

1: Statistic show homicides always spike immediately after executions of any notoriety. Thus the executions always result in extra deaths of innocents.

2: If we believe killing is wrong, we shouldn’t allow the state to do it either.

3: Executions in the US are more costly on average than incarceration of the convict in question–legal costs of appeals etc.

4: In a number of recent cases, the innocence of the condemned was pretty clear.

For the reasons above and simple morality, I am against capital punishment in the US.
Given the above, the only reason for execution is revenge and retributive punishment. It’s barbaric, and I question if the victim’s families or loved ones actually gain any lasting emotional benefit. I suspect it’s rather the reverse.

Now, if I was asked the Dukakis debate question–what if your wife was raped and killed?–I’d honestly say I’d be glad to trip the trap door or push the plunger myself. That doesn’t make it morally or rationally right.

Lee, your last comment disappoints in that it seems to suggest morality and rationality are abstract questions rather than real aspects. If you want to trip the trap door or push the plunger for your own, who are you to tell others they can’t when they want the same?

Tom: Just saying that I’m not likely to be immune to emotional urges that aren’t moral or rationally right. And just like with others, there could be cases where I shouldn’t be given the power to fulfill barbaric urges. Can’t you envision wanting revenge in a case where fulfilling that urge wouldn’t actually serve any good?

I think if I were Dukakis I would have responded: “Bernard, if you even laid a hand on my wife and child I’d quite likely break your neck with my bare hands.”

I can well envision wanting revenge. I just wouldn’t involve the trap door, the public resource.

But now I’m being glib and that isn’t my intention here. My aim was to voice some understanding for those who would want the most basic retributive justice. I’m not so refined as to call that want barbaric. Yet even fully acknowledging that. With a certain slowness of spirit you can notice the futility of satisfying that want. And then there’s the perverse aspect of this terrible punishment being something of the reward these warped children seek.

Well, my comment and I think the debate question applied to punishment after the crime, not prevention or defense. It all becomes something to do with human progress. In Henry VIII’s time retribution included unspeakable torture before execution and display of the deceased’s heads on London Bridge; our constitution ruled against such cruel and unusual punishments, executions “progressed” from hanging and shooting to electrocution and lethal injection. In my view, the next step is forbidding state murder.

Everyone is equipped at birth with the potential and innate skill of violence, along with many other emotional abilities including revenge. There have been times in human development when revenge carried out gave an evolutionary benefit to the pack or tribe that enacted it, in increasing chance of survival of the pack by minimizing the rewards of attacking that pack. overcoming those urges is called civilization. A work still in progress.

As for the perpetrators seeking martyrdom, it’s an atavistic urge encouraged by an atavistic religious dogma and not to be encouraged or rewarded in any way by civilized peoples.

But , Tom, you wholly support the Regime when it kills criminal suspects without trial. interesting indeed. From a libertarian perspective, the government never has the right to kill a person under any circumstances. Equally, its unfair to ask the citizens to pay for the housing of society’s garbage indefinitely. the obvious answer is to hand the felon over to the family of the victim and let the family decide the fate of the deviant.

The “libertarian perspective” doesn’t offer much of interest when it won’t countenance reality. In an ideal world it might be a fine notion for government —or anyone else for that matter—never ever having “the right to kill a person under any circumstances” —but then you come to terms with the world as it is and the pat schtick plays pretty thin.

Only because you don’t want to be consistent. Obama does not have a right to murder criminal suspects, but you support that, and then you claim to get the willies about executing people properly tried and convicted. I like the concept of handing the criminal over to the victim’s family. It can’t work any worse than the system we now have.

Maybe you see your insistence on making every discussion we have here on this blog come round to visit the topic of your own warped loathing for the president as some sort of virtue like consistency. I don’t.

I do understand the emotional appeal of your suggestion about leaving punishment to the victim families. But like many of libertarian ideals it only fails reality —abdicating social responsibility and calling that virtue as well.

It has been a hard and sobering thing for me to come to realize that I believe there are people without whose presence the world would be better. As an aside, none of them are inconvenient unborn persons. They are people who have earned that status by their horrific treatment of others. But I still only believe this as some sort of Platonic principle. It serves not to make me support capital punishment but rather to keep me out of the protest vigils when someone is executed whom I believe with high certainty has been justly convicted. But my take still troubles me because I want to be simply and without qualification on the side of considering all life sacred.

My issue with the death penalty is about the practical limits of certainty and accuracy in our non-Platonism, flesh-and-blood system of justice.

Of course, it’s a freshman, or worse, setup. “all the evil” indeed. The better question is te trolley conundrum: You see a runaway trolley car with three people on it, heading for a crowd of women and children it will surely kill. You can throw a switch and derail the trolley, killing three instead of a dozen or so. Would you?

It’s a philosophy question, Lee, meant to flesh out what Tom is trying to address above, or Dirk for that matter. The original rule read one person. I didn’t change the rule: you did. (Kirk – Star Trek – the Kobayashi Maru simulation!) The trolley question addresses something different, not better.

It’s a great exercise–to demonstrate how useless freshman philosophy is in addressing the real world. In the real world, executing one evil person is a guarantee innocents will die at the hands of the unhinged that execution arouses. And yet we do it repeatedly, against rationality, justice, logic and any kind of good moral philosophy.

And now in the US we have moved from protesting torture of suspected terrorist to accepting the administration’s targeted killing of groups of men who gather in traditional Arab garb in shaky Arab countries. And accepting a US gunfire death rate beyond all but a few nations’ civil wars.

The aspect of capital punishment that takes it a step away from the philosophical speculation is the basic fact that killing a convicted criminal already in the custody of the state doesn’t retroactively save the victim of the crime. It isn’t the heat of battle we are discussing or just war theory. It’s whether or not the state sets about a ritual killing.

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